AUTHORITY AND INSURRECTION by ian macdonald, retired

Authority and Insurrection Part I

The last couple of years have witnessed determined challenges to the autonomy of Senior Police Officers coupled with widespread disorder. The right of Chief Constables to remain in Office has been severely tested and the creation of Police Commissioners will see an increased scrutiny of how they lead. An operational incident involving the attempted arrest of a suspect led to local disorder which quickly spread across the Country. This has happened before. The late 1970s and early 1980s were battlegrounds between Politicians and Senior Police Officers and between rioters and the less senior Police ranks. The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has unwittingly linked them both by claiming that the arrest of leading gang members in the wake of last year’s riots has led to more violence in areas where younger members have filled power vacuums. We must hope that the recent enforced removals of Senior Officers does not have a similar effect on the Police Service. Ambitious young Superintendents can be troublesome.

This article is the first of two instalments which will look back to the tumultuous events of the 70s and 80s and examine how senior police officers tried to deal with challenges to their authority by politicians community groups and mobs, and will then leap forward to seek parallels with more current events.

When I joined the Liverpool and Bootle Constabulary in 1971 the Chief Constable was Sir James Haughton. He was known by two very different nicknames, ’Sunny Jim’ and ‘The Smiling Assassin.’ He deserved them both. As a senior detective in Birmingham Sir James was instrumental in the introduction of Regional Crime Squads, which spread across the Nation as an early example of cross border collaboration. They rapidly became both successful and notorious. As a Chief Constable he inherited a City (Liverpool) and soon after a Town (Bootle) in which a combination of booming night time economies and a faltering industries and docks was reflected in rising violence and crime.

I now digress to write about the origins of units, Charles Darwen having comfortably beaten me to it on species. I have observed in a number of settings that the origins of a unit often stay with it. Whilst working in Jamaica in the late 1980s .I was initially puzzled at the reluctance of the Jamaican Police to leave the station and go out on patrol, I thought they were worried about the violence that they may encounter, but learned that this was not the case. They were not at all intimidated by the violence that they encountered and indeed they frequently initiated it. I came to realise that the Force had started as custodians in ‘Lock Ups’ to which plantation owners would bring troublesome slaves, and so were inclined to stay in the Station. I went to South Africa to monitor their policing of the elections which led to the appointment of Nelson Mandella as President. I chatted to a South African Policeman who fondly reminisced about expeditions into Angola to ambush and kill what he had thought were terrorists but were now called freedom fighters. I asked him how long he had been in the army before he joined the Police, he replied that he hadn’t, these had been Police Operations. . He was in a squad, (a squad is a Unit with some bad intentions.) It was only when I returned to the UK and did some research that I realised that the South African Police emerged from paramilitary ‘Commandos’ formed to fight the Zulus and the British.

To return to Liverpool. Houghton’s predecessor Acting Chief Constable Herbert Richard ‘Bert’ Balmer had formed his own Commando Squad to combat the drunken and the criminal elements of the City by ordering each Territorial Division to contribute a number of Officers to a Central Squad. Those who arrived were a mixed bunch. Some were drawn from specialist ‘Plainclothes’ Sections and included some proven thief takers. Others were sent along because they were considered difficult to manage. Soon after taking up Office Houghton renamed them the Task Force. They patrolled crime and disorder hotspots in ‘Jeeps’ in what could most kindly be described as an enthusiastic and robust manner As with Sir James’ previous creation of the RCS they quickly became both successful and notorious. I was a teenager embarking on a long and varied social life at this time. I can testify that the sight of one or more clearly marked long wheel based Land Rovers roaring down the street was a clear signal that it was time to stop whatever you were doing and go home. Their crews were not given to negotiation.

The Task Force quickly became a popular place to work. They were on ‘Days and Lates’ and were thus excused Night Duty, which was and still remains an unpopular and arduous shift. The team spirit was excellent and in an early form of community engagement they engaged with grateful Licensees and Club Owners who plied them with trays of ale when it was quiet. Uniform Foot Patrols were no more a deterrent to car thieves and pickpockets then than they are now and so Task Force Officers donned plainclothes and conducted clandestine observations before leaping out and arresting startled offenders. Crime and disorder fell to the point where the notion of disbanding the Task Force and returning the Officers to three shifts on their under resourced Divisions was mooted. This spurred them on to greater heights. Arrests for assault, disorder, going equipped for theft, offensive weapon and ‘suspected person loitering’ (known in Liverpool and Bootle as ‘SPL’, and elsewhere as the ‘Sus Law’) increased. So did complaints.

Liverpool 8, known after the riots of 1981 as Toxteth, was a particular battleground. Local youths especially members of the long established but severely alienated Black community were convinced that the Police were discriminating against them. Community leaders complained bitterly to Sir James about the outrages committed by his officers, and threatened that if matters did not improve then widespread disorder would take place. Houghton listened to them carefully and expressed his dismay concern and support before assuring them that he would act quickly to resolve their grievances. As soon as they had left the room he would turn to his staff officer and instruct him to ‘’Get the vans out.’ ‘High Profile Policing’ which involved the Task Force engaging in confrontational stop checks and arrests for minor infractions intensified. The Liverpool and Bootle Constabulary had made the serious mistake of measuring their work in activities, such as increasing arrests, rather than in outcomes, such as a falling crime rate. The Task Force had successfully resolved some problems with crime and disorder and they should have been deployed either differently or elsewhere or both.

Houghton’s successor Sir Kenneth Oxford had also spent his earlier service as a successful detective but he was a very different character. He had worked in the Met for a contender for the outstanding Police Officer of his generation, Commissioner Sir Robert Mark. Mark had vigorously stamped out police corruption and had confronted anti-establishment demonstrators with the paramilitary Special Patrol Group. He was a firm advocate of Police independence, and resigned in 1977 following a disagreement with the Home Secretary Roy Jenkins over the introduction of an Independent Police Complaints body which he thought would undermine police discipline and effective investigation. The times were changing, but Oxford paid this no mind.

He had arrested James Henratty for the notorious A 6 murder and Christine Keeler for her part in the Profumo Affair. When the World Cup was stolen he was tasked with its recovery but was beaten to it by Pickles the dog. Oxford had a lump on his head and was nicknamed with a shocking lack of creativity ‘Lumpy Head’. He joined Merseyside Police as Deputy Chief Constable on the 1st November 1974 and began well. I attended a meeting on juvenile crime and his grasp of the facts, chairmanship and handling of a diverse and potentially difficult group were exemplary. Oxford was wined and dined in after hours drinking and gambling houses by a small and extremely powerful clique of Senior Police Officers. They thought that they were about increase their already considerable influence through their new accomplice, who clearly liked a drink or seven. They were mistaken. As soon as he was appointed Chief Constable Oxford removed them from the temptations of territorial command, and caroused with them no more.

In later service I drank with Oxford on a guest night at the Police College. As the night went on he withdrew from the conversation and watched like a hawk as his less careful colleagues imbibed to excess and lost some of their inhibitions. (So far as I can remember.) One Officer decided to tell him exactly where he was going wrong. Oxford listened carefully, smiled grimly and nodded occasionally. I had to go and get the Officer out of bed the next day. He was remorseful in the extreme, and feared for his career. When he eventually got promoted people thought they had picked the wrong Jones. Sir Kenneth was in many ways a liberal Police Officer for the times, and pioneered the use of cautions for minor offences including the unlawful possession of drugs. However he had a fiery temper, was reluctant to accept advice and was dismissive of criticism. He feuded with both the Chair of the Police Authority Margaret Simey and with Alison Halford the Country’s first female Assistant Chief Constable. He seemed to view their close relationship as a threat rather than a strength.

By the time Oxford met with Community Leaders from Toxteth they had formed into the militant and radical Liverpool 8 Defence Committee. Unlike Houghton he acted upon their complaints. He transformed the Task Force into the Operational Support Division (OSD) and controversially banned them from patrolling in Liverpool 8. Whilst monitoring the South African Police I was told of a unit became so notorious for their unnecessary violence that their name was changed and their vehicles were painted a different colour. Their personnel, equipment, operating principles and activities remained the same. This was not the case in Merseyside. Each time the name of the Squad has been changed from Commando to Task Force to Operational Support Division and more recently to Matrix its style has become less aggressive, and their work has become more sophisticated so that Matrix now target Organised Crime Groups and Gun Crime. Still, I am sure that the DNA of the Commandos still lurks somewhere in the chromosomes of Matrix, that they are a squad rather than a unit.

To encourage cultural change Oxford placed the OSD in the charge of Chief Superintendent Don ‘The Don’ Grieve, one of his erstwhile drinking partners, Superintendent George Wareing who had been a Syndicate Director on my Special Course and the redoubtable Chief Inspector Peter Smith. This was a team who encouraged neither aggression nor duplicity. The OSD were now focussed on harvesting shoplifters in the City Centre, easy ‘handovers’ which counted as crime detections and looked good as statistics . They perpetuated the focus on outputs rather than outcomes. Toxteth was off the agenda, and Officers who sailed to close to the wind soon found themselves ‘binned’ and sent back to their Divisions.

Here was the crucial difference between Sunny Jim the Smiling Assassin and Lumpy Head. Houghton took a hard line but avoided conflict. Oxford did the opposite. Despite his attempts at conciliation the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee viewed him as an aggressive and unsympathetic racist. It was to cost him and the Force dear.

Oxford also differed from Sir James Anderton, another outspoken controversial and idiosyncratic Chief Constable who reigned at the other end of the East Lancashire Road in Manchester. Anderton thought that he was Oliver Cromwell in an earlier incarnation and behaved as if he was God in his current one. He campaigned against the organised crime gangs that controlled the sex trade and illegal drinking clubs in Manchester, and successfully drove down drink related crime and disorder whilst alienating the gay community on behalf, he claimed, of the ‘general public.’

Anderton and Oxford were fierce rivals. There is a story in which Anderton had his driver ring Oxford in his office and inform him that he had Mr Anderton waiting to speak to him from the car phone, a new invention. Oxford immediately ordered his secretariat to have a car phone installed in his vehicle. He then got in the car and ordered his driver to ring Anderton’s driver. The following conversation took place.

Oxford’s driver. ‘Mr Oxford wants to speak to Mr Anderton on his car phone.’

Anderton’s driver. ‘Mr Anderton is on the other line.’

This story has been told about other competing leaders elsewhere. It might not be true. The significance is that it is Anderton who comes out on top.

They were both in Office when the Toxteth riots broke out. There are many reasons why these riots were so uniquely violent intense and vicious. Poverty and crime and disorder go hand in hand, and unemployment was rife as the City’s docks and factories foundered. The council re housing policy of moving the poorer tenants from slums into new properties had caused widespread discontent, and employers in the nearby city centre were notoriously reluctant to employ black citizens. Riots in London and Bristol inflamed a range of grievances, and showed that the Police would struggle to cope with a determined insurrection. Police Officers are often the victims of the failings of others. It goes with the cloth.

This is not to say that the Force was an innocent victim. Policing in Liverpool and Bootle in general and in Liverpool 8 in particular had systematic and structural problems. The Divisional boundaries were ill conceived. Upper Parliament Street, a major thoroughfare with bars and clubs marked a Divisional boundary, so that patrols operating in the area came under two different commands and two separate communication channels. There was no strategy for policing the area Mobile Patrols responded to incidents then drove away. When Officers were deployed on foot they were often looking for criminals, and indiscriminate and inflammatory stop checks were a standard tactic. The plainclothes section rules the local clubs with a strong hand and raided and closed those that they considered troublesome with impunity. Although Oxford had banned the OSD from the area they still prowled around the edges, and could enter in hot pursuit of suspects, an exception that rioters soon exploited. Critically there was the sense in the community that Oxford and the Officers he lead were hostile intolerant and unwilling to listen.

Sir Kenneth Newman was a successful and influential senior Police Officer who was Chief Constable of the RUC, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Commandant at Bramshill and an HMI. He devised the tactics and equipment intended to combat violent disorder in the late 70s and early the 80s. This were not his finest work. There is an unwritten law in military history, ‘Plan for the next war, not the last one.’ This law was ignored by the French, who built the superbly impregnable Maginot line between France and Germany after the horrors of the trenches in the First World War. It was followed by Hitler who drove his tanks into France through undefended Belgium. Newman planned to quell disorder similar to that which had occurred during the celebrated Grosvenor Square Riots of 1968. Here a large crowd of predominantly left wing students tried to force their way into the American Embassy as part of a demonstration against the Vietnamese War.

A casual reader of contemporaneous accounts may think that this was just an elaborate ritual. Demonstrators were reported to have tore up a plastic fence, uprooted parts of a hedge and broke a number of windows. This happens in my street most nights. However the event extensively filmed surviving clips show a fierce and protracted battle in which stones firecrackers and smoke bombs were thrown at Mounted and Foot Officers engaged in close combat with the rioters. The statistics show that there were nearly 250 arrests and 50 people, half of them demonstrators and half of them police officers were taken to hospital.

The Grosvenor Square Demonstration caused a great deal of concern. Unprotected Police Officers had struggled to control demonstrators and new tactics were required to stop them forcing their way past Police lines. Newman introduced bussing and debussing in which Police Officers practised getting on and off them in sequence, and introduced long protective shields to protect small snatch squads who were meant to dart out to grab troublesome demonstrators. Had Grosvenor Square happened again these tactics would probably have worked. It didn’t . Toxteth was very different. The rioters hadn’t read the manual.

By 1981 broke out Joe Squires was the Chief Superintendent of the Division which covered half of Liverpool 8, along with a stretch of the City reaching out through the suburbs of outer Liverpool beyond what is now John Lennon Airport. I returned to duty as a patrol Inspector in 1981 having spent a few years at Manchester University. I was posted to Belle Vale which was one of the suburbs under Joe’s command. It was not as nice as it sounds but nowhere near as volatile as Liverpool 8, where the Bobbies complained that when they tried to make an arrest that neighbours and passers by would try and ‘spring’ the prisoner, and that threats and bricks were routinely flung at them. Intelligence gathering interpretation and dissemination was poor, and Joe got to hear very little of what we would now call Tension Indicators, in part because his staff were scared to tell him. Even if they had there was not much that he could have done.

In July the OSD were famously lured into Toxteth in pursuit of a couple of youths on a motor bike. It is suspected that there were arrangements to attack them at a set location but they caught up with their quarry before they got that far. The fracas that followed as the rider escaped developed into full scale riot that lasted for several days. Joe Squires strode out onto the streets to confront the rioters and was attacked injured and taken to hospital, leaving the Division leaderless. After a few hours of running fights badly shaken Officers were ordered to reassemble in the yard of Wavertree Police Station, which lay just outside the Liverpool 8 area. George Wareing of the OSD addressed them. He had also been bravely engaged in the fighting and had sustained a large and very visible cut where a well aimed brick had struck the top of his hairless head. George informed the disgruntled survivors that they had made a tactical withdrawal to allow the area to settle down, and that Senior Officers were seeking to negotiate with Community Leaders. This neither reassured nor appeased his audience who knew a headlong retreat when they had been in one and considered negotiating with Community Leaders a form of treason. Having finished his briefing George decided to enquire as to the welfare of the Officers thus.

Superintendent Wareing. ‘Is anybody injured?’

Disgruntled Police Officer towards the back. ‘Only you, you stupid get!’

It made it all almost worth it, but worse was to come.

Ian MacDonald
Assistant Chief Constable,
Merseyside Police
Retired

November 2012

Authority and Insurrection Part II

This is the second of two articles examining parallels between challenges to the autonomy of the police and outbreaks of disorder in the early 1980s and the present. Part one examined the build up to these tumultuous events. This piece begins with the commencement of the Toxteth riots, with the Merseyside Police effectively chased out of the area and trouble spreading throughout the North West. It will look at how deficiencies in equipment tactics intelligence communications and leadership hampered Police efforts to initially prevent and eventually restore order, but will also pay tribute to how these troubles were eventually resolved..

In the late 1970s police officers diligently practised bussing and debussing and elaborate drills with long shields, procedures which were redundant in the fighting in Liverpool 8, most of which took place in Upper Parliament Street, a very wide thoroughfare. As the rioters attacked groups of officers carrying long Perspex shields were exposed to attacks from the side. They desperately linked their shields to form a single line across the road. Now they were really in trouble, but from the front. Rioters approached the shield wall at point blank range and threw bricks which conveniently bounced back to them for recycling until they eventually struck someone. More enterprising assailants used cast iron railings and scaffolding poles to puncture the wall. Some engaged in teamwork and dropped lampposts over it. Rioters commandeered milk floats, placed bricks upon the foot pedals and sent them careering towards the lines. They threw hundreds of petrol bombs, made with bottles stolen from the same dairy. Locals still attribute the decline of the milk round to these events rather than to aggressive pricing by supermarkets. Few officers were badly burned but the flames forced them to drop their burning shields, and any breaks in the line were attacked by a second wave of rioters who hurled projectiles to devastating effect. After the first night of rioting my uncle who owned a pet shop in Lodge Lane at the top of Upper Parliament Street rang me and asked if his Mynah Bird would be safe. I assured him that although there may be trouble properties would be safe and there was nothing to worry about.

Later that evening as major unrest broke out again I was sent to Police Headquarters allocated 2 sergeants and 20 constables and marched to Upper Parliament Street where the Rialto, a dancehall converted previously into a furniture store and now into an inferno. We joined the shield wall, making it deeper and harder to miss. I never saw them again as a unit although I may have bumped into a few of the survivors when things quietened down. The noise was deafening and communication via radio was impossible. In any case there was no one in charge to speak to. Some officers blew whistles but no one knew why. It probably made them feel safer. Assistant Chief Constable Austin Rawlinson bravely joined the shield wall but was unable to alter the way the fighting was conducted, he was too close and could not make himself heard. Someone or other was trying to run things from the control room, they were too far away and could not make themselves heard either.

The shield wall plodded on up the road, like and blinded bloodied but determined boxer. At one point it halted alongside a community centre close to a major junction. The centre was surrounded by a formidable fence that was too high for the police to climb but low enough for the rioters to throw heavy objects over. Losses began to mount. I held a hasty conference with a fellow Inspector, who shall remain nameless. A number of expletives have been omitted.

Me. (Pointing forward.) ‘Let’s cross the junction. Then they can’t get us from the side.’’

Fellow Inspector ‘No, they’ll attack us from behind.’

Me. (Pointing backwards.) ‘OK let’s fall back to that building line. Then they can’t get us from the side.’

Fellow Inspector. ‘No, we can’t go back.’

So, we stayed where we were, and they continued to get us from the side. In later life I learned that some people prefer the dreadful certainty of leaving things as they are to the frightening uncertainty of change.

Such was the intensity of the attacks that tear gas was used in a public order situation in the UK outside of Northern Ireland for the first time. It made little difference. If anything the wind was blowing towards the Police lines and the rioters were unaffected and undeterred. Having ran out of canisters authorised firearms officers (AFOs) used ‘Ferrets’, small projectiles designed to penetrate buildings and fill rooms with tear gas. They didn’t work either, at least not as intended. One rioter carrying a lit petrol bomb approached the line along with a small band of accomplices. They were dressed in army camouflage gear and black clothing and looked as if they knew what they were doing. An AFO discharged a ferret aiming, he later claimed, at a traffic signal junction box close to the petrol bomber. He missed his chosen target but the petrol bomber dropped to the floor. His companions attempted to drag him away but then abandoned him as police officers ran towards them. The ferret had struck him in the groin and he was losing blood rapidly. His accomplices took his incriminating clothing from the casualty ward, seriously weakening the prosecution case. He was declared ‘not guilty’ after a retrial and eventually received compensation having been identified as one of a startling number of innocent bystanders. He died soon after. Our lack of equipment had nearly killed him on the spot.

As morning broke the battered shield wall reached the top of Upper Parliament Street and turned into Lodge Lane. Most of the shops were ablaze. We found some old ladies looting a supermarket and told them to go home. They were carrying margarine, and when asked why they hadn’t taken the butter they replied that it was too expensive. Other looters fled from an off licence, save one who had drank so much that he could only crawl. He got arrested, the rest got away. I approached my Uncle’s shop with a sinking heart with visions of a charred Mynah Bird in the wreckage. The shop was intact, guarded by my Uncle and his family and friends. As a resident of Toxteth he had automatically assumed that as I was a Policeman I would be lying when I assured him of the safety of the shop and the bird and had recruited some vigilantes. The following conversation took place.

Uncle Billy. ‘What took you so long?’

Me. ‘I’ve been busy.’

We trudged on.

The |Tactical Aid Group (TAG) Manchester’s equivalent of the OSD turned up to help and, to our intense relief they suffered heavy casualties. If they has saved us life would have become unbearable. Anderton ordered that they were to be properly protected. They located the only ‘proper’ riot helmets in the country and he despatched a vehicle to collect them. This was the decisiveness that gained him the respect of his force. We had to make do with NATO tank helmets, designed to shatter on impact to absorb the force of bullets. Better equipment in the form of cricket boxes shin guards and perhaps most importantly short Perspex shields was found or made and issued. This new kit made it possible to run at rioters without being injured by the missiles they threw, so they ran away. Injuries fell and arrests increased. The pendulum began to swing in the favour of the police.

The riots continued for days, died down and then flared up again. Enter Inspector Jimmy Gibson. He looked like Desperate Dan of The Dandy, was an accomplished athlete had a brain the size of a planet. He went on to become a Commander in the Metropolitan Police but was under promoted. Jimmy knew Liverpool 8 from his time there on patrol, in the Task Force and as a member of the plainclothes section. To help him inform the control room of what was happening he purloined a driver and cruised about in Traffic cars, which were attacked and destroyed on consecutive nights. He went to the Police garage to get another one and was handed a curt note from Traffic Superintendent Gil Hughes informing him that if he didn’t look after this one it would be his last. Realising that his strategic approach was not in step with established practice Jim turned tactical and joined a shield wall at the junction of Upper Parliament Street and Saint Nathaniel Street. Every time the wall moved forward rioters on the first and second floors of the adjoining flats dropped large items including a motor bike and television sets on the officers below. 1980s televisions were not flatscreens, they were more like small warehouses. A well aimed set broke the shoulder of one constable and the skull of the other who were stood slightly to the right of Jon Murphy, the chief constable of Merseyside and I. Some officers still wish it had fallen slightly to the left.
At this point Gibson sidled up to me. I should have run away. The following conversation took place.

Jim “We need to clear the second floor of those flats.”

Me “How are we going to do that?”

Jim “I thought you might take a few guys up there and capture the landing.”

Not for the first time in our relationship Gibson had skilfully switched from ‘We’ to ‘You’ without my noticing.

I gathered a few willing Officers and briefed them as best I could. The noise was deafening and projectiles whistled past our ears. I shouted very loudly and waved my arms as if I were a nineteenth century Missionary converting the Heathen. I was about as successful. I explained that we were going to capture the third landing on the second floor. Some of them nodded which led me to think that they understood and agreed. I have come to realise that I was trying to explain too complex a concept. The next time the shield wall surged forward we raced up the stairs. In accordance with my instructions I ran past the ground floor past the first floor and onto the second floor. The newly formed squad ran past the ground floor and attacked the first floor which was as they interpreted it the second floor. Or landing. Whatever.

The rioters I encountered were mainly women, who screamed and ran away. A lone male hit me on my newly acquired NATO tank helmet and shield with a hammer. I struck him on the arm and head with my baton. If the equipment had been swapped he would have laid me out in seconds, as it was he eventually slumped to his knees. He said, in a French accent, “I am not a bad fellow you know.” My first thought was that continental revolutionaries had joined the insurrection and we were doomed. He turned out to be a sole onion seller who had ridden a bicycle to the North West whilst wearing a beret and a striped vest. He had fallen into a violent relationship with a Kirkby girl and came to hate the police officers who turned up and arrested him.

After a few moments some of the squad wandered up the next flight of stairs out of idle curiosity. They seized upon my assailant restrained him further and dragged him away. He was paroled in time to take part in skirmishes in Toxteth the following summer where he was again restrained, not by me. I have not seen him since and I don’t want to. This brief episode highlighted how ineffective the standard issue equipment was. * Batons are now longer and heavier and I hope, more effective. The NATO helmet may have been good for stopping single bullets it was not so good a taking repeated hammer blows. When I took it off it had split in two. I would have been safer if he had shot it.

As the disorders continued the OSD had taken to driving their carriers and jeeps amongst the rioters, another tactic previously used in Northern Ireland. At first the crews remained in them. Once the rioters realised this they attacked them at close range. This meant that the crews could not get out even if they wanted to. Interviews with participants in last year’s unrest reveal a kind of ecstasy that overtakes rioters. It has to be seen to be believed. One leaped on top of a Carrier and tried to throw a petrol bomb into the vent on its roof. If he had succeeded he would have killed the Officers inside. As it was he nearly killed himself as the petrol bomb exploded at his feet. His intentions were lamentable, his nerve was admirable. These driving tactics led to a controversial death when a partially disabled youth was run over. In another incident a rioter was trapped between a vehicle and a wall in a collision which raised a cloud of dust from the building and broke his back. When challenged about these tactics Oxford replied with the brutal accuracy for which he will be remembered “They can see the vehicles coming and they know what will happen if they get in the way.” As the disorder continued the crews took to leaping out of their vehicles and the rioters scattered. The transition phase was difficult.
Although the equipment and the tactics gradually and steadily improved the use of intelligence didn’t. Looters had stashed their booty in the area and although denunciations came in searches were not commissioned for fear of ‘inflaming the situation,’ which would have been quite and achievement. I went to daily briefings and on re emerging was eagerly accosted by my PSU, who asked “What’s happening?” After George Wareing’s misfortune ** I knew better than to tell them that we were undertaking a tactical withdrawal or were consulting with community leaders and I had learned not to enquire about any injuries that they may have sustained. I replied “I dunno” which was true but not helpful.
A form of command and control which formed the foundations of today’s Gold -Silver – Bronze began to evolve. It included all the Superintendents in the Force to spend a week on Night Duty in charge of Toxteth. This was fair. Fairness is a sure sign of a bureaucracy and it doesn’t work in riots. Few of them were trained for what they faced and some of them were not suited to it.

In the last episode of ‘Band Of Brothers’ a series based on a US Airborne Unit in the Second World War the surviving ‘real life’ members were interviewed. When asked about their leaders they said “They got us the equipment we needed and stayed out of the way,”

A Superintendent turned up in Liverpool 8 as per rota. He was nicknamed ‘Aberfan’ for reasons which became obvious.*** He had not seen Band of Brothers (it wouldn’t be made for another 20 years.) and he quickly showed a perverse propensity for micromanagement. We were on standby which given our exhausted condition meant ‘sleep.’ He decreed that we would place half of the PSU on the bus and the other half in the canteen, and that they would swop places every two hours. I pointed out that this meant that no one would get any sleep and that if we were called out to action that to get half of the PSU on the bus would take as long as it would to get them all on. I had after all been trained in both bussing and debussing. The following conversation took place.

Aberfan “My decision is right. It is illogical but it is right.”

Me “Yes Sir!” (Salutes smartly and carries on.)

The eventual training and deployment of cadres meant that whoever was in charge wanted to be there and knew what to do. He wasn’t one of them.

The first four nights of rioting in Liverpool saw 150 buildings burned down and 258 police officers treated in hospital. One of them eventually died, after more than a year and a day, so that under the existent law he was held not to have been murdered. He was. There were further outbreaks into August, with a final toll of 781 police injured and 214 vehicles damaged, mainly thanks to Jimmy Gibson. There were around 160 arrests, but few of these were in those initial outbreaks of violence. If it had been a boxing match it would have been stopped.

When ‘copycat’ riots broke out at Moss Side Anderton gave community leaders the chance to defuse the situation and when this proved unsuccessful he sent in TAG who swiftly restored order. The community leaders appeared on television and explained that the Anderton had told them what he would do if they couldn’t sort it out and had then done it so they couldn’t really complain. There was none of that in Liverpool

The many complex reasons for the riots were lost as the focus turned on Oxford who was forced to take a step back from proceedings. Margaret Simey the Chair of the Police Authority was frustrated by her inability to either influence him or call him to account and observed that the people of Liverpool 8 would have been “apathetic fools” if they had not protested. This may or may not have been true but it was hardly a help at the time. Eventually the disorder died down, but not before an ‘Oxford Out’ march saw several officers stabbed outside the old Police Headquarters in Hope Street. Oxford stayed in and continued to feud with a range of authorities over a range of issues albeit with lower levels of intensity. He was knighted in 1988 retired in 1989 and worked for charities until he died in 1998.

As the dust settled Superintendent Dave Wilmot who was to eventually succeed Anderton as the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester was put in charge of what became known as ‘The Toxteth Triangle.’ He implemented an apparently radical policy in which the area was policed by foot officers alone, with neither mobile nor traffic patrols and a skeleton CID. In fact it was a continuation of the move away from hard line policing that Oxford had introduced before the riots. It was claimed that officers posted to ‘The Triangle’ had bullseyes painted on the back of their tunics to make them easier to hit. The OSD spent their evenings on the borders ready assist when their colleagues came under attack, which they did with chilling regularity. Police horses had not been used in the riots in case the rioters hurt them and police dogs had not been used in case they hurt the rioters, although both sections were keen to get involved. Now dog patrols were an important police presence in Toxteth. .Gradually the violence subsided, partly because the organised crime teams who prospered in this safe environment did not want to bring attention to their business and largely through the bravery of those unsung foot patrols. Toxteth remains a deprived area pitted with ruined and vacant premises with remarkably low levels of street crime and disorder.

Sir Robert Mark, Sir James Anderton and Sir Kenneth Oxford saw that organised crime and disorder were increasing and they each decided to do something about it. Crime prevention and community engagement were small and ineffective departments, ‘bolt ons,’ still in their infancy. Collaboration hadn’t been invented and these men of their time weren’t about to bring it in . They considered operational matters to be theirs and theirs alone and they would not tolerate any form of interference from politicians or authorities or the public. They responded to challenges to their authority by forming squads, which at the time were just about the only tool in their kit bags, but they didn’t work. The myths of Police autonomy and invincibility were shattered on the streets of Toxteth, and they have not returned.

The police of today are better informed trained equipped and led than they were then. The prompt and effective intelligence led operational responses to last year’s riots were followed by thorough investigations and well presented prosecutions that have deterred offenders and encouraged communities. They are more accountable now than it in the early 1980s. Officers of all ranks are called upon to justify their actions far more swiftly and far more often. These changes are not motivated by political extremism or inherent criminality. They are a part of a major and sustained shift in attitudes towards authority.

Interference and assistance are very different things. The one hinders and the other helps. The introduction of Police Commissioners is meant to help, and they may yet prove themselves ‘a good thing.’

Ian MacDonald
Assistant Chief Constable,
Merseyside Police
Retired
November 2012

* OK my leadership wasn’t too good either…

**See Part 1

***He was a Welsh disaster.